Muh Blurg

This is my blog for things I find interesting, my blog for things I find cute is @cutepicsformydarling

[frontmansdefender]

I aspire to be as passionate about something as this guy and the orcas are passionate about hating the sunfish

In the sunfish’s defense!!!!!

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

as humiliating as it is to repost myself from a light-mode-user's reddit screenshot, i cannot allow this year's zenquish to go uncelebrated.

celebrate my favorite holiday with me, my friends.

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

if the emperors of rome can add extra months that actually fuck the calendar up i'm allowed to add a new month that lasts 0.0000 picoseconds

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

the last holiday that hasn't been commercialized

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

i made this up when i was a little kid and nothing would make me happier than to see people celebrating it for years to come

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

i forgot how much tumblr loves a fake holiday

[slightly-sigilant]

I have a new standard for the level of haterdom to aspire to, and it's Reddit User KismaiAesthetics, who hates doing laundry so much that he got really good at it, so that he can (I quote) do it right the first time, every time, and get back to watching cat videos on the Internet.

and by "really good at it," I mean that he does a bunch of reading on the chemistry of laundry, subscribes to academic journals about laundry, and buys a bunch of different laundry products (including from outside the US) to scrutinize their ingredients and test them for himself. he writes a bunch of incredibly detailed longposts about his findings on /r/laundry and his website, which is also about laundry. he even got interviewed about his laundryposts, in which he revealed he's writing a book about laundry. this man is like ahab and the white whale, if ahab had a reddit account and moby dick was a pile of clothes with cheeseburger stains on them

[slightly-sigilant]

anyway the reason I encountered this guy was because recently, the household washer has been leaving these gross little oily brown flakes on anything washed in it. this is kind of a big problem for me, given that I not only have (literal, diagnosed, medicated) OCD which includes a contagion phobia, I also sew a bunch of stuff with the intent of gifting or selling it, and sometimes that involves prewashing fabric. only, you know, washing is supposed to make things cleaner, not dirtier.

and my research brought me to (gross photos warning!) Kismai's post on the very topic. apparently this stuff is called "scrud," and it's basically a residue that forms over time inside the nooks and crannies of a washing machine - leftover detergent reacting with mineral traces in tapwater to form a buildup that also traps dyes, grease, and other dirt, which bacteria then feeds on, because it wasn't already gross enough. it forms faster if you have hard water, use too much detergent (which most people do), use fabric softener, wash only on cold and the list goes on and on - point is, scrud is the reason that you have to actually clean your washing machine, or be super fastidious about how you do laundry.

(I'll take "things I wish school/my parents actually taught me" for 800)

so now I am engaged in a lengthy battle against scrud, armed with a tub of oxiclean and a sack of citric acid crystals. (we're renters, so disassembling the machine is out of the question.) pour in a scoop of oxiclean, run a machine clean cycle, pour in a scoop of citric acid, run another machine clean cycle, all while wiping piles and piles of scrud out of the drum at the end of each cycle. I'm on the eighth cycle now. there's still so much scrud. the reddit record for "how many cleaning cycles were needed to get a machine entirely free of scrud" is 22 cycles. help

[slightly-sigilant]

hey so like

it turns out that laundry sucks significantly less when your clothes and sheets and etc actually come out of the machine looking, feeling, and smelling clean, rather than looking, feeling, and smelling like despair dipped in slime

like, I have this pillowsheet I call my Depression Era Pillowsheet, because during a Real Bad Time of my life when 90% of all I could do was lie in bed and cry, that was the pillowsheet I laid and cried on. this went on for weeks, and it was never changed out because, again, 90% of my waking hours were Lie In Bed And Cry Hours. it did eventually get changed out, but no matter how many washes I put it through, it remained stained and slimy. like I'd throw it in every time I washed my clothes and it would still come out feeling like someone had applied a fresh layer of Weeping Slime Laminate to it. someone with more sense probably would have thrown it out but idk, I just never did for some reason

anyway! taking some pointers from the freaks over at /r/laundry, I grabbed an enzyme-based detergent, a booster (thing of More Enzymes and oxygen bleach that you add alongside detergent to make it clean gooder), and washed everything on hot (in a machine without a scrud problem), including the Depression Era Pillowsheet. it finally came out looking and feeling like fresh clean cotton?? what?? I hadn't even done the whole "soak it for 24 hours in various unsettling substances" thing??? wack

[dominicanmermaid]

[riku-usi]

標識ワニ「ワーニング」陶器フィギュアの通販を開始しました！

立体 - BOOTH

[slowavesloth]

[shieldfoss]

#people out there forgetting that the efficiency ALSO trades off against navigability during heists #if i was crawling in the air ducts and got blocked by turning vanes i'd be furious

[literallymechanical]

ok being serious here for a sec, but you absolutely can climb through air ducts and it's very fun!!!! If you move slow it's quiet, they are not full of filters and equipment (why would they be full of things that obstruct air flow????), and yeah they can be cold and windy but like, that's part of the fun? They're also not dusty, why would a place with extremely strong airflow be dusty?????

I feel like everybody vaguely remembers that one mythbusters episode and quotes it like that was the be-all and end-all of HVAC duct traversal wisdom

No, the actual hard part with air ducts is all the un-trimmed sheet metal screws that protrude into them, you need to watch your hands and keep low. I have yet to see a move where somebody hunches up a little too far and slices up their back (it's not fun!!!)

[semusepsu]

I spent a year or so installing and replacing HVAC and never have I installed a vent system that a fully grown adult could climb around in. Literallymechanical's comment about the screws is real and it makes me think they might know some of what they are talking about but check it:

The air systems I installed usually had a branching design where the main corridor off of the air intake was in theory big enough for a person, but each branch gets progressively smaller, because this is more efficient, because the farther from the pumps the less air pressure the system has. So while there are large enough vents exist, they are not the majority of vents. Second, these often had crossbars to strengthen them at regular intervals, which would at the very least make traversing them awkward. Third, while some vents have the structural support where a worker could rest their weight on it, and thus presumably a person could go in it, again, this is only true of some vents in a larger system. Fourth, while not dusty per se, the inside of old vent systems are sometimes full of crusty white limescale from condensation. I remember replacing one such system that had been installed in the 1980s. Definitely not the clean interior you see in the movies. Fifth, on the matter of equipment that restricts air flow, most vent systems actually have firestoppers at regular intervals so that a vent can be closed off so that smoke and fire cannot move through the building via the air system. Sometimes literally blocking the flow of air is a good thing!

So yes, if you have a set of blueprints for the vent system, and know the places that you are going are accessible from the largest vents, and supported well enough, and the person in question is small and/or flexible enough that the crossbeams are not a problem, then yes you can use the vents to move around. But really, you are probably better off spoofing your credentials and buying a janitor's outfit as a disguise.

[requiem-on-water]

Sulfur combusts on contact with air to create stunning blue lava-like rivers of light in the Kawah Ijen crater on the island of Java | Ph: Olivier Grunewald

[40ouncesandamule]

Orcas filmed ramming one of the world's heaviest fish so hard it explodes, possibly for fun

Orcas are known to be smart and ruthless hunters. They've been observed hunting a variety of prey, with some species, such as whales, larger

I'm Johnny Knoxville and this is Jackass

[40ouncesandamule]

[marxistlesbianist]

Yup

[staranos]

That's absolutely insane.

[archatlas]

Really Big Coin Skrekkøgle

This is our Really Big Coin. It is big because it makes other things look small when photographed next to it. Actually, it is a 20:1 replica of the EUR 50-cent, you see it being milled out here. We needed to do quite a bit of sanding, lacquering and smudging to obtain the desired look and some climbing to get into required shooting position (you need to get up real high to take good pictures). The result is a short series of photographs, attempting to visually scale down real-sized objects.

Images and text via

[aberrantkenosis]

what the fuck

[southerntinkerbelle]

Kim Possible was like I’m an extremely adept martial arts fighter and world hero and this is my sidekick Ron who comes along because he’s my best friend and I like him

[nateconnolly]

These days, lots of public libraries have a "library of things" collection where you can check out kitchen appliances or yard tools or toys, and, as a children's library assistant, the most popular library of things item that I handle regularly is a plastic scepter thingy called like "unicorn princess magic wand". And whenever I check it out I make a big show of looking at the little kid and being like "do you solemnly swear to use your unicorn princess magic powers only for good and never for evil?"

And pretty much without fail, the little kid will get the world's most mischievous grin and go "I'm gonna use it for EVIL!!!"

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[curlicuecal]

Related:

I quit writing when I realized I had no desire to do all the steps to professionally publish a book. And I started writing again years later when I realized I was allowed to do things I enjoyed without a profit endgoal

You don't have to do a thing the way society says is correct

You can do it the way that is satisfying to you

[almostarts]

Sculptural braided beeswax candles !

Courtesy : @ ceremoni.studio, @ gregoratorio

Credit: AD Italia

[oughtnots]

memes from an alternate universe my friends and i invented where the government gives you free code-protected laundry but the late penalty is dire

[firagasoap]

Broccoli Knuckle Duster by David Delahunty

[the-big-mood]

The process of carefully layering and then cleanly unmolding a rainbow jelly cake

[dogpuppy]